Name: Japanese Pet Names ♡ What to call your partner? ハニーって本当に呼ぶの？
Uploaded: 2017-01-22T07:52:40.000Z
Duration: 6 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Present continuous

Today we're going to talk about terms of endearment in Japanese.

Or pet names, AKA the things you call your significant other

You can call your SO pretty much anything in English.

It doesn't even have to be a real word if you say it with the right intonation.

People can understand that you're using it as a term of endearment.

You can be like, "This is my snickerdoodle here" or something

and people would be like, "All right, that's just what they call each other."

"They call each other 'snickerdoodle'. Ok."

So what kind of things would you say here in Japan for a pet name?

I really can't think of anything right now.

Do we even really have any pet names? I don't think we do.

We know that you guys use "honey" or "darling".

We have katakana so we just spell it "hani-" or "da-rin".

There kind of aren't really any Japanese terms of endearment.

I guess Japanese people don't tend to be very verbal with their affection.

So they do actually kind of have one term of endearment that you can use here,

which we're actually taught in Japanese 101 you're not supposed to use

because it's rude if you know someone else's name and you use the word "anata."

You see married wives call their husband "anata" sometimes.

It seems like a word that's more commonly used among married couples or-

Not like "old" old, but they've been married a while.

That's kind of the image I have of anata.

I read Death Note both in Japanese and in English,

and Yagami Light's mother, she called Soichiro "anata."

And in the English version it's translated as "darling."

So that's kind of like the one word you can use here that's an actual word.

Other than that I feel like you would kind of have to make up your own pet name

or something like a nickname for someone, right?

Yeah, a lot of my friends call me Jun-chan.

If you're a little bit nerdier or I guess if you want to joke around, I guess you could say -tan.

Well I don't know any friends from Akihabara who actually use that.

In the beginning of our relationship I didn't know any terms of endearment in Japanese

and so I would just make things up to call Jun.

So I would say things like "suteki na otto,"

Which is saying my magnificent husband or something like that.

You can just make stuff up. Whatever sounds good with you then I guess.

And I mean you know it's not like there's a wrong way to call someone in Japanese.

Just because they don't have terms of endearment really

doesn't mean you're not allowed to make up a term of endearment.

But if your partner is Japanese, I suggest you ask your partner if it sounds okay first at least, I think.

I don't want you to call me like magnificent husband in public.

Hello everyone, this is my magnificent husband.

I would never say that in public to other people.

See Jun's not comfortable with this stuff in public.

No, no, no. I'm fine. But it sounds weird.

What if I start calling you like sugar muffin in public?

I really don't know. Sugar muffin? That sounds sweet.

If we were with a group of friends,  would you be embarrassed if I said like...

"Hey sweetie, can you come over here for a second?" or something?

Jun started using terms of endearment here just recently.

He's using the word honey, but he doesn't really know how to use terms of endearment,

so he only uses it when he's really stressed out.

Like he wants me to come get the cat because he's trying to work.

He's only using it in really bad situations.

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Japanese Pet Names ♡ What to call your partner? ハニーって本当に呼ぶの？

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